Timing is Everything

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The suspense of the story was building. The child had been the last survivor of a marooned party and was destined to die from exposure. But, despite being inferior in every measurable way, he was adopted by a great ape and raised as one of their tribe.  It came as no surprise that, as the boy grew, there was a growing animosity toward him from Kerchak, the leader of the great apes. Resentment turned into anger. Anger became animosity. And animosity grew into deep hatred which generated threats. The threats continued to build until ... it was time for dinner.

I loved it when Mom read us cool stories. But why did she always pause the stories in the middle of a crisis?

As a kid, growing up in a world with lots of fun things to do, I did not take to reading automatically. It seemed like reading a story was an interruption to my fun. I associated reading with school lessons. And said lessons were viewed by me as "questionably" necessary evils that I had to endure to gain an education. Furthermore, whoever selected those stories had a profoundly boring, or perhaps vengeful, sense of literature.

If those schoolhouse stories were carefully crafted to inspire my imagination to remove a couple of floor tiles and tunnel out of the classroom into the free air, it worked. I can't count the times I rescued my fellow inmates from the oppressive boredom of the classroom, in my mind, of course.

Back to Tarzan.
To this day I don't know if Edgar Rice Burroughs was the most brilliant storyteller of all times, or if my mother had the most impeccable timing of all readers. I suppose it could have been a combination of the two. And, upon further retrospection, it may have truly been pure happenstance. But it ultimately bore fruit.

One day I woke up and realized, Hey, I don't have to wait for Mom to get around to finishing that book she's been reading to us kids. I can pick it up and finish it today! And the rest, as they say, is history.

I've read just about everything I could get my hands on. I have even been known to spend hours reading the encyclopedia. My wife and I consider it a great date to go to a library in a new town and just browse. We have done so on numerous anniversary outings.

Not every reader turns into a writer. But this one did. Perhaps it was genetic. My mom is a writer. Or perhaps it is environmental. I always loved to hang around with the old guys and hear their stories of days gone by. Whatever the cause, I have been infected.

This year I expect to have several more titles published. Four of them have already been written and are in the proof-and-edit stage. Those are all children's and young audience books. I am getting close to finishing a novel tentatively titled Time Zone. And, who knows, there may be enough year left to get the last book of the Falcon series out.

In all, I don't know if it's legitimate to blame my mother for all of this. It seems like moms get blamed for everything bad. Why not throw in a good blame on mothers every now and then?

My First Escape Room Experience

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"You need to go to IKEA," they said.
"It'll be an experience," they said. 
They were not kidding, it was an experience. And I managed to get out the door for just under a hundred bucks. Not bad for being 832 miles from home, and in a foreign country!

It was a day, much like any other day, except, of course, that it was the day after Black Friday. And ... from our kids' place, we drove for two hours, crossed an international border, traveled halfway around Lake Ontario, and made it into the very shadows of Toronto. (Okay, not technically halfway, but we did get to the north shore.)

I don't know if any of those factors affected the crowds. My daughter said they were about normal, but I was overwhelmed before we got in the door. Fortunately, the grandchildren were there to comfort me.

As it turns out, IKEA is a huge, busy place. They are actually a destination shopping store. That seemed unimaginable to me. But then, my idea of a good shopping trip is that all the items on the list will have been vetted, put in order of how they will be encountered at the store, and loaded into the cart efficiently. Getting through the checkout quickly with no problems scanning the bar codes equates to bonus points.  The coups de grâce of a shopping trip for me is that I have parked in a space near the cart corral, and that I can pull straight out instead of backing out. My needs in life are pretty simple.

Back to IKEA.
I might have mentioned that it was a huge store. In truth, it was an enormous labyrinth of chambers. Each of those chambers was ingeniously laid out to simulate a particular room in a home. And every room you would find in a home was represented many times over. I lost track, but there must have been a hundred chambers.

They did not have the rules of the "Escape" game posted clearly, but I determined early on that the goal was to navigate through all of the chambers without getting anything stuck in the cart. I was never sure about the time limit, but I am sure we exceeded it. Within the Escape game, there were "wild card" obstacles, such as strangers. They were everywhere we turned, which really complicated the navigation. I think it would have helped to be fluent in at least ten languages. That could have improved our time score significantly, but would have necessitated talking to strangers. And we all know that reduces your score. So maybe we broke even there.

The really challenging part of the course was that each chamber had some Siren that called out to the participants. Apparently I'm deaf to their frequency. It was a good thing for my wife that I was there to keep her from getting eaten or enslaved. I considered tying her to the mast, but decided against it as we might have been disqualified for cheating. I surely didn't want to have to go back to Start. In the end, we did actually beat the game, but we were pretty well exhausted.

The irony of the whole trip was that two of the three most expensive items we came away with ... were for me. A dresser for my work clothes, that was nearly 75% off, and a really nice french press coffee maker were the prizes. I have not had a few minutes to assemble the dresser, so there may yet be another adventure lurking in those heavy boxes. But I have been enjoying the "new" way of making coffee. 

In all, it was an interesting experience. And the marketing engineers of IKEA are clearly genius. I guess, for the money spent, we came away with some pretty good entertainment.

The Battle of Peace on Earth

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Sometimes I wonder if the battle scenes in my books might be too graphic or gory. But then I remember that the day after Thanksgiving is National Mortal Combat in the Wee Hours of the Morning Day. That title is frequently abridged to Black Friday to make it sound civilized and socially acceptable. But we all know the reality of this day. It is the only blood sport that is universally practiced in America. But it does reassure me about the content of my books. 

There is, however, one feature of Black Friday that has always been a muse and pleasure of mine. It is the only morning out of the year in which I sleep, while everyone else is up early. Normally, I'm up and going between four and five in the morning. It is a solitary existence, especially on Saturdays, to be working on something while the world sleeps in. But, it is also a delight to get things done undisturbed.

So if you are one of the millions of Americans engaged in combat shopping today, and you find this in your inbox as you wait in line for the next available cashier, or if you are awaiting triage at the emergence room (for those who have gone to level-three shopping), I want to thank you. Thank you for getting out of bed while I slept. Thank you for taking the "early" watch. Thank you for providing amusing antics for us socially awkward people who would rather observe human behavior than engage in it. And thank you especially for giving me that sense that I'm not completely abnormal. It is a temporary sensation, I know, but it's sort of fun for a few hours in the morning, once a year.